Do you think MS will ever adhere to web standards?

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Not a poll, a discussion.

I think they will.

They will have to. They may not want to, and they may not do so, but they will have to, if they don't want internet explorer to become irrelevant. They might not even be able to, witness internet explorer 8 which is choosing to keep compatibility with previous versions over web standards.

Web standards are what is causing this surge in web applications (what people call "web 2.0", though really that's just a meaningless buzzword). If it's not easy to write web applications that behave properly across all platforms, and anything that makes it easier for them is going to cause the applications to be better. If the applications run better on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc, then that's what people will use.

Microsoft will have to to win back the more Educated-Users switching to OSX, Linux & Mozilla Firefox. Also to broaden support for there OS from OEM's & organizations that will overall increase Microsoft's revenue.

Seriously, enough people are still using IE that Microsoft will not have to worry about it. They hang behind all the other browsers and do everything wrong, but people still hold on. When other browsers were worried about standards, Microsoft finally figured out tabs, and that was good enough. Many IE users haven't even updated recently enough to have that. So, maybe in several years when Microsoft is still trying to decide whether to bother doing CSS correctly or to just invent their own "standard" (again), they might feel the impact of people switching because THE WEB WON'T WORK, but for now it is not a pressing issue.

I doubt it; MS is pretty stubborn and they're too arrogant to accept standards imposed on them by others.

Well, I hope it does standardize. I still prefer IE, although I've been using Firefox for the last 4 months.

I've never shouted at Internet Explorer that way I have at Firefox. This thing pisses me off. I like some of the addons I have for it, and it being more "secure", but I still get pissed off with this client. And no, I'm not getting annoyed with it because of it not loading something properly or whatnot.. It's focus pisses me off.

If I was into this sort of thing more than I am, I would just make my own damned browser, because overall I think both IE and Firefox suck. I have yet to try others, or Chrome yet.

Which particular standards are you referring to? MS has completely embraced XML and uses it throughout its products. The Xml libraries in C# are easy to use and allow developers to persist data in XML in only a few lines of code.

I have been out of the development thing for a long time but in my experience I've never found it to be of any companies interests to be concerned with standards of any kind unles they can create them.
Whats the point of follow the leader unless you want to suck hind tit so I have a hard time understanding what kind of assurance you want from this type of post.

Absolutely none.

It was something that gamefreak said about MS using a lot of debian things in windows 7 that made me wonder: if they are getting more flexible in that regard, what about things like css?

Internet Explorer 8 is going to be quite an improvement when it comes to web standards by the sounds of it. It will be using standards mode by default except for Intranet sites.

I wonder if it will have support for External Cascading Style Sheets as well as good HTML 5 support.

External Style Sheets can help make websites more accessible to people with disabilities. They can also be used to offer better web page designs that don't work properly in IE, because of it's lack of web standards support.

Flash for videos could get replaced thanks to the new HTML 5 video tag, but browsers will need to have support for it of course. There is also a new audio tag. Firefox 3.1 has built in OGG support and etc. https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_ ... in_Firefox

Internet Explorer will always be behind when it comes to web standards, unless they provide support for say Webkit or Gecko. Or start improving IE's rendering engine properly, then provide an update for the latest version of IE at that time with those changes soon after.

IE having support for Gecko dream on Microsoft did destroy the original Netscape after all (, yes the one that had it's source code released to the Mozilla Foundation). Imagine what people would be saying if Microsoft suddenly provided IE Gecko support. Webkit on the other hand they can provide support for and it has actually been considered according to Steve Ballmer himself: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08 ... in_ie.html I wonder why the date is not 06/11/08 in the URL.

If IE does use Webkit it will obviously still have support for MSHTML/Trident.

Gecko is a difficult project to program by the sounds of something I read before.

Old versions of Frontpage were absolutely horrible when it came to web standards support. I think Frontpage 2003 had quite a bit better web standards support in comparison. Frontpage is dead now and I think that Microsoft's replacement program has much better web standards support.

Fo-Rum Chrome is still in beta, and it lacks quite a few features so I can't really recommend it yet for general usage, even though it is quite a nice browser. Chrome sadly has no Linux distros or Mac OS X version yet.

Fo-Rum so you don't particularly like Firefox, well then I highly recommend that you try Opera ( http://www.opera.com ). If Opera isn't even good enough for you, get back to me with that information. I am able to tell you about quite a few other good http://www.w3.org standards compliant browsers that you can use in Windows. I am pretty sure that at least one of my recommended browsers you will like enough, and that it will then get you away from the worst browser of all Internet Explorer.

I predict that Micro$oft will adjust to web standards just as much as the "Big Three" automakers adjusted to the demands of their respective marketplace.

That is, not at all, until it's too late.

Just because they use xml (like mark-up) doesn't mean they are sticking to standards, and in that application it is not strictly necessary so long and they are able to set a president.

IMO xml is totally bloated, and you waste time trying to parse it. Yes of course if you have a set layout and know what you are looking for than that makes it a lot easier, but that defeat the purpose anyway. Compare to something like yaml, xml isn't dry and isn't elegant.

There are situations when xml makes sense, but the fact it is used often without a schema shows that people use it just because, not because it is appropriate.

That's why I asked which standards. The OP did not specify. "Web" is not a standard.

I do however think that if IE is compatible with every single website on the web and renders as fast as Firefox that will be a good thing. The only reason I might use IE is because starting up the browser is way faster than Firefox on some older machines. However even on those older machines I use Opera.

As stated previously; I think you've got it exactly backwards. Microsoft is working for the day when it is the standards.

Has HTML 5 actually come out? No one ever tells me these things...

It does not seem that HTML 5 has been properly released yet, but the validator ( http://validator.w3.org/ ) has experimental support for it.